If you’re living in in the early second quarter of 2026 in the UK, you may well be aware that the best ISP of modern times – Brsk – has been taken over by a company called YouFibre. If you read recent comments on r/YouFibre you’ll also be aware that the transition is not going well, to the detriment of many previously-ecstatic customers. YouFibre seem hard set on destroying any remaining trace of the prestige of its previous owners. The only saving grace as far as I’m concerned is that by the time stage 2 of the enshittification process is complete, namely the acquisition of YouFibre by Virgin Media that seems imminent later this year, I’ll have spent most of my 18 month contract and can start planning my escape. This is of course unless they don’t reply to my formal complaint within seven days and I refer them to the broadband ombudsman and Ofcom, citing breach of contract, to be released from said contract with no termination fees.
What on earth has happened to earn this level of disgust?
Like many (most) of the public complaints to be found on r/YouFibre, my account has been overcharged for the service I use (BetterNet2000). I also have BeterIP which provides a static IP outside of CGNAT that is an essential part of my business with them. It’s crucial to host my various services, including this website. I contacted their support team via email on Thursday evening last to report the overcharge, not expecting any kind of response within days or weeks, based on the aforementioned Reddit reports. To my initial surprise it was replied to within minutes, the agent saying that it would be looked into.
Seconds later however, my troubles began. The fibre broadband connection was reset, I was allocated a new WAN IP and my crucially important static public IP address was lost, replaced with one behind CGNAT. It’s useless of course, doesn’t even respond to pings. They hadn’t warned me this was going to happen, and hadn’t even asked if it was okay to do this. My self-hosted website, my self-hosted blood glucose monitoring, my self-hosted cloud storage service, git environment, document server, image server (and CDN), dashboard, music server, servarr stack and Jellyfin – all gone.
I immediately complained and the agent apologised for the problem, so that fixed everything. No, of course it didn’t. My sense of doom deepened as they said it would be passed upstream to the next level of support and I would be updated when they had a solution.
Three days later I’ve received nothing but further apologies. I did some investigation and discovered that in fact I do have grounds for pressing for breach of contract on their part, since a change was made unannounced, and the now missing part of the service is integral to my use of said service. I’ve been advised to send an official complaint (which I have done, and it’s been acknowledged with another apology), and will contact the broadband ombudsman and Ofcom 7 days from that acknowledgement if the matter is not resolved.
In the meantime…
Tailscale has come to my temporary rescue. Running the Tailscale package on my pfSense router has meant that I can keep HaProxy for my routing and SSL tasks there too, bypassing the need for a public static IP address. It’s not all sunshine and roses, though.
Just Works (on my Tailnet, so secure 🙂)
Portainer, Servarr stack, Nightscout, Seerr
Additional Faff (because I can’t expose publicly behind CGNAT, necessitating a Cloudflare tunnel 😟)
Jellyfin, Website, ownCloud, Immich (and proxy), Paperless-ngx, Forgejo, Homarr
Photo by Tara Winstead on Pexels
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